Startup Tools
One of the best things about starting a company is you get a chance to start with a fresh set of tools. Not that you can’t do this at any point, but after a while you get used to the tools you’re using and the switching cost is too high.
These are the tools I use everyday and couldn’t do my job without:
Let’s you very easily take screenshots or screencasts. It’s always running in the corner of your screen, so 1 click to start it, 2nd click pick the area you want to capture, and 3rd click to capture an image or video. Your media is automatically sent up into the cloud and the link to it is pasted to your clipboard. I probably use this 20 times a day, especially as my team is all distributed. It’s invaluable for bug reports. I can’t believe it’s free.
I remember switching over to Subversion from CVS 5 or so years ago and not realizing what I had been missing. I can rename files without destroying the repository! This pales in comparison to the benefits of Git. The biggest benefits I realize are 1) it’s decentralized, you can make commits, rollbacks, etc when you don’t have an internet connection. The full history is preserved when you get around to pushing to the central repo. 2) Branching is beautiful. By some form of magic, all branches are contained in the same directory. So when you switch branches, your actual files get updated. Switch again, and your back to the old files. This allows for a much cleaner dev process, just one directory per project. (I used to have dozens). 3) Github is fantastic. Picture all the best plugins from SVN for browsing/search/blame/history graphs/etc, like Fisheye ($1200), with super simple administration, one click repo creation, trivial to add users, fork, etc. And again, it’s free.
Developed by a couple crazy Italian brothers, this is really simple and elegant mockup software. There is an Adobe Air desktop version which actually lets you walk through a mockup. A great way to explore a new UX before building anything. $79 for serious users.
My favorite development environment. I’ve used Visual Studio, Eclipse, and various others over the years, and in the end what you really need is something that is really fast with some basic functionality like color-coding, macros, auto-indenting, Regex Search & Replace, etc. TextMate has those in spades. And the OS integration is great; I love being able to cd into a directory and “mate .” to open up the code in seconds. I happily paid $25 for it.
The best one-two punch of issue tracker and project management software available today in my opinion. The key to successful issue tracking and project management is keeping things very simple. If it takes more than 1% of a developers time to keep up to date, he’s not going to do it. These accomplish that with really simple flows, a nice AJAX UI, and intuitive states assuming you’re following an Agile methodology. Lighthouse integrates with email and your SCM so that you can update tickets via your revision log on commits. Slick. PT does some smart things like calculate how much you’ll get done in an iteration based on past performance. Again, slick. They both have iPhone friendly interfaces as well.
As my old business partner used to say, “The difference between a software company and a guy in a garage is deployment”. I couldn’t agree more. And the key to good deployment is automating everything. Hudson is a continuous integration system that is a swiss army knife of all things deployment related. At Grogger, we use it to listen for every commit to our dev branch, check out a local copy, run our full regression suite, email the team if the build breaks, and push the latest code to our staging environment. So we always have the latest code on staging and find out within a couple minutes if the build is broken. I love Hudson. They also have an awesome logo.
Ten years ago (wow), I worked at i-drive.com and we tried to solve the problem of storing your data in the cloud. We were ahead of our time as storage was not yet basically free as it is today and the average user’s bandwidth wasn’t were it needed to be. These issues are gone today and there are a bunch of players in this space. The key differentiator (as is the case with most software these days) is user experience. Dropbox has this nailed. It just works. It shows up as a folder on your computer and anyone else’s who has permission to use it. Make a change to a file and it seamlessly gets synced everywhere. No conflict resolution dialogs, no error messages when you come in an out of internet connections. It just works.
I can’t even imagine having a remote team without Skype. Skype never closes and I’m more or less constantly chatting or talking over it. If it only integrated it’s chat history better with Spotlight… And again, because my whole team is on it, all that communication, half way around the world often, is free.
Amazon Web Services & RightScale
At Grogger, our entire infrastructure is in the cloud. All of our production, dev, staging, build, monitoring. Everything. This is pretty easy these days with AWS.
Rightscale takes this a step further by allowing you to create server templates, which are basically recipes for how to create a server, what to install, what scripts to run, etc. This allows you great flexibility, change one script and it applies to all of those templates. Another thing RightScale gives you is deployment cloning. Let’s sayyou have a cluster setup with multiple web servers, a db master and slave, memcache servers, etc. Rightscale lets you clone that entire deployment, for example if you want to setup a temporary staging environment. And finally Rightscale has some fairly sophisticated auto-scaling of your app server layer. I would give RightScale my full endorsement if it wasn’t so expensive. These prices will surely come down as their competitors get close on features, but for now they’re really the only one out there that can serve as a full AWS mgmt system.
Honorable Mentions
Sequel Pro: A great database mgmt tool for OS X
Cyberduck: The best tool for moving files on OS X. Supports (S)FTP, WebDAV, S3, etc.
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